Are you doing all you can to stay healthy and help prevent future problems with delicious and nutritious meals and snacks?

Learn easy, new ways to prepare and enjoy your favorite foods from several talented chefs and renowned nutritionists. With their great ideas and recipes, you may not even realize youre decreasing your risk of heart attack, diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer and other diseases and conditions. Oh, and best of allÂ free tastings!

Enjoy and learn from these great demonstrations and workshops:

Lentils: Small But Mightyby Kusum Gupta 9:00 a.m.

Indulge your appetite, spice up dinnertime and treat your taste buds to an exciting array of flavors. Kusum Gupta shares her wisdom about foods from India that are high in fiber, and low in saturated fats and cholesterol , with a concentration on how to include lentils in our daily diet.

Find out why Rebecca Rothbaum of the Poughkeepsie Journal, wrote: Healthful, nutritious food often suffers a reputation, deserved or not, as bland, dry and generally unappealing. Kusum Gupta is doing her best to turn that notion on its head.

Kusum Gupta is the author of Recipes with a Spice - Indian Cuisine for Balanced Nutrition, a collection of 260 recipes from different regions of India, using whole grains, lentils, vegetables, and different spices and herbs. A graduate of Delhi University, Gupta worked for IBM in the US for nearly 25 years before retiring in 1992. Her love of cooking and her quest to promote multiculturalism and a healthy way to live have led her to teach Indian cooking in several community education programs.

Eat Fat, Lose Fatby Melanie Ferreira 10:00 a.m.

Melanie Ferreira is a health educator, writer and nutritional consultant with over 30 years experience in the culinary and healing arts. She has devoted her life to the relationship between food and its effects on health. Ferreira, a pioneer in combining gourmet and healthy cuisines, was personal chef/consultant to two princesses of Saudi Arabia and French actress Isabel Adjani, and founder of the Healthy Gourmet Cooking School. She has been contributing food writer for Natural Health, Macro News, and other health publications and was recently featured on several NYC television shows. Ferreira is currently an instructor in the Natural Gourmet Cooking School Chefs Training Program and at the Institute for Food & Health,and maintains a private consulting practice in the tri-state area. She is also on the steering committee of Slow Food Hudson Valley.

Do you find yourself frequently craving sweets? Chocolate? Bread and other carbohydrates? Do you find that you need coffee, a sweet snack or chocolate to get you through the day or night? Does your energy level seem to crash around 3 p.m.?

If you are answering "yes" to any of these questions, please join us as Holly Ann Shelkowitz sheds some light on the meaning of those cravings.

By examining your daily lifestyle choices and behavioral patterns, you will learn easy, tangible ways to take better care of yourself. You'll leave this class with an understanding of the intimate language of your body and then you can give it what it truly craves.

Holly Ann Shelkowitz is a Graduate of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York, and is a Certified Nutrition Counselor, accredited with the American Association of Drugless Practitioners (AADP). In addition, she holds a certificate of advanced herbal apprenticeship with Pamela Montgomery, and has studied with leaders in the field of herbology and aromatheraphy. She lectures and teaches classes and workshops throughout the United States and Europe.

At the recent ExpoWest, the world's largest natural foods expo held in Los Angeles in March '05, keynote speaker Andrew Weil, M.D., leading expert on nutrition and health, pointed out that one of the top health concerrns facing Americans today is "diabesity," the link between diabetes and obesity. This epidemic is caused largely by the standard American diet of overprocessed, overcooked fast foods, depleted grains and highly refined sugars and chemical sweetners. Americans are currently in a chronic state of malnutrition even though they're eating more than ever before.

According to Brenda Davis, RD and Tom Barnard, MD, authors of Defeating Diabetes and noted dieticians and nutritional scientists, "the one caloric sweetner that stands out above all others for people with blood sugar challenges is agave syrup, which has a lower glycemic index than any other nutritive sweetner."

At Organic Nectars, we apply our culinary, nurtitional and promotional expertise to offer gourmet-quality raw, organic component condiments and develop recipes to inspire the food industry and home chef. To replace refined sugars and corn syrup, we use only pure, low glycemic ingredients such as our 100% raw, organic agave nectar, integrating it into all cuisines. At our presentation at the Women's Health Expo, we'll demonstrate how to create easy-to-make Asian dipping sauces and discuss how you can incorporate this revolutionary sweetener into your day-to-day cooking repertoire for healthy, delicious and fulfilling dishes.

At Hanka's Table by Hanka Sawka 1:00 p.m.

Hanka Sawka's culinary autobiography "At Hanka's Table" describes the importance of gathering at the table. Historically, this helped Polish national identity to weather brutal occupations and political oppression. Personally, it helped she and her husband, Jan, survive exile from communist Poland. During their new life in the U.S., the table became a social focus for developing Jan's international artistic career.

Sawka will demonstrate her cold summer soup, a dish featuring fresh, cooked and pickled vegetables, herbs and buttermilk. This pink-colored soup is as refreshing on a warm day as it is nutritious. She will talk about the Polish culinary history that is the background of this soup, discuss the healthful Polish tradition of seasonal cooking and share her thoughts on the importance of cooking and eating together with family and friends.

Hanka Sawka, her artist husband, Jan, and their toddler landed in NYC in 1977 as exiles from Communist Poland. They arrived with $52 and a couple of suitcases and embarked upon a life filled with art and adventure. While Jan gained renown as an internationally known multimedia artist and designer, Hanka cooked, to the delight of the artists who often gathered at their table; her recipes draw upon diverse European and Asian influences, a reflection of Polands tumultuous history and its location at the crossroads of Europe. Her book, At Hankas Table, is the remarkable story of a Polish-American family, told through food, history, personal narrative and art. She has been entertaining guests for more than 30 years, has lived in Paris and NYC, and currently resides in High Falls, NY.

Registered dietician Jennifer Stack offers a cooking demonstration and a video made with the New Jersey Diabetes Association called Dinner at Six.

The 20-minute video shows how to make a three-course diabetic dinner with only 600 calories, 60 grams carbohydrate and 6% saturated fat calories; recipes will be provided. Stacks live demonstration and review of key points when cooking for someone with diabetes will include discussion of portion control, flavor enhancement and volumizing with vegetables.

Jennifer Stack has over 12 years experience providing counseling for people with difficult dietary problems, including diabetes, heart disease, obesity/overweight and eating disorders. Her training includes a Master of Science degree in nutrition from New York University and a dietetic internship at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Stack is an award-winning graduate of The Culinary Institute of America, a registered dietician, and has been a guest on CNN, MTV, ABC-TVs Good Morning America, and The Food Network. She has written for Cooking Light and Womans Day magazines, and has had stories syndicated through The Associated Press News Service. Stack is chef and proprietor at Cedar Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast.